


one hour tonight

by goingaftercacciato



Category: The Halcyon (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Historical Inaccuracy Very Likely, M/M, No D'Abberville, Non-Graphic Mentions of Injuries and Death, Nothing Like A Bombing To Make You Carpe the Fuck Out of Your Diem, Rated O/P, Sorry But I Mean Fuck That Guy, The Blitz, The O Is For Overwriting; The P Is For Pretentious Use of Language, Ye Olde Homos Be U-Hauling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:47:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26672395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goingaftercacciato/pseuds/goingaftercacciato
Summary: He has come to know war with unwilling intimacy, spent every day hugged in its bleached embrace and bracketed by its wailing voice. But nothing has prepared Toby for the reality of it: the noise it makes when it comes knocking at his door, the hot smoke panting in his face, the weight of air clogged with the dust of things that no longer stand, the starving fire, the chaos, the dead, the dying.
Relationships: Toby Hamilton/Adil Joshi
Comments: 10
Kudos: 12





	one hour tonight

**Author's Note:**

> Just your obligatory, run-of-the-mill 'what if D'Abberville never discovered them, and Toby and Adil were in the hotel when it was bombed' fic because canon is my sandbox, and I will throw out whatever I want and reshape it however I please.
> 
> Tbh, this fic is...less than coherent...I mean, it's the second fic I ever wrote for them, so it's a little :/ and I was feeling a little too 🤪 to proofread it as well as I should have, but oh well. Here it is anyway. Hope you guys like it!
> 
> Title from "If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight)" by Doris Day.

In the past three months, he has spent more damp hours than he cares to count huddled underground: feeling the thin earth flinch, hearing the city crumble, tasting the ancient ash on his tongue and breathing it into his inexperienced lungs. He has seen the aftermath, up close: the reduction, the blank spaces left behind like missing teeth in a smouldering smile, the pulsing amber glow that infects the smooth navy of the night, sending its thick, sooty fingers after the stars. He has run the numbers, quantified misery and loss, typed it out in impersonal black and white before his raw eyes. He has come to know war with unwilling intimacy, spent every day hugged in its bleached embrace and bracketed by its wailing voice.

But nothing has prepared Toby for the reality of it: the noise it makes when it comes knocking at his door, the hot smoke panting in his face, the weight of air clogged with the dust of things that no longer stand, the starving fire, the chaos, the dead, the dying.

The hotel trembles, and the crowd moves, like water thrown from a bucket. Their fat jewellery glints as they hurry to cover their coughing mouths, as they bat away the ash and smoke, as they grab frantically at each other. Toby is pulled along by the hysterical tide, stumbling over chalky fragments of his family’s gilded legacy. His eyes glaze over the cut-off room, stinging, unsure what they’re searching for. 

Somewhere, over the roar, somebody is shouting, but their tone is all wrong. “Move to the exits, please. Don’t stop moving until you’ve reached the street,” they insist serenely, the absence of panic so absolute it pours a shiver down Toby’s spine.

The narrow doors clatter and snap on their hinges, battered by the tidal wave. A moment later, Toby is artlessly spat out into December’s cold, interrupted hands. 

Freed from the confines of The Halcyon, the flood disperses, surging out in every direction. Toby, meeting the clean, chapped air with impatience, wades to a street lamp; its ribbed metal, silent and impassive, bites at his palms and ties him down to the concrete. He closes his eyes, but it doesn’t heal the itch of the powdered stone on his skin or block out the hollow sound of a hundred previously untouchable lives brought abruptly to the frontline.

He can’t be sure how long he slumps there, head down and spinning, blank and empty.

“Toby!”

Freddie’s fingers anchor themselves in Toby’s shoulder and tow him in. He goes easily, caving into his brother’s seasoned arms, happy to let Freddie take the burden of his ceaseless weight for a moment. 

“Have you seen Mother?” Freddie asks, pushing Toby back into himself.

“No,” Toby says, surprised his voice can even manage it when his vacant stomach is seeping out through his feet and his shuddering body has been evicted, everything thrown out in choppy, feeble piles. 

“Emma?”

Toby shakes his head, frothing the vicious eddy of his thoughts. “No, no, I--” His words melt, turn to slimy pond water on his tongue. Across the congested street, he catches a grubby flash of pressed ivory, and all at once, he remembers he doesn’t carry his heart in his own chest anymore. “Oh God. Oh God, oh God.”

“Toby?” Freddie’s concern trickles in and out of Toby’s ears, ineffective and at a distance. His fingers sink in, painful and solid and shaking. “Toby, what is it?”

“No, no no no.”

“Toby--”

Swollen up with scummy fear, Toby sheds his brother’s urgent grasp and breaks into the dulled crowd. His legs move of their own accord, calcified with purpose against their wobbling timidity. The dazed faces drift around him in a cinder-painted parade, but none of them are the face he is desperate to see: the one that he has studied with devout attention for the last three months, in quiet sleep, in tempered passion, in whispered joy; the one that he knows, by heart and by touch, better than his own; the one that makes him wonder if all those Sunday stories about angels are true after all. 

He chases after every blurry glimpse of white, but Adil is nowhere to be found.

That disingenuous morning in October, when he woke with the grey report fizzling out from the wireless—seventy-four dead in Paddington, buried beneath concrete and shrapnel—his breath had turned to glue in his lungs, and he had thought he’d been pushed to the very threshold of his briny anguish. That he could never feel a worse pain than the full-body bruise of panic that he had felt then, panic that only lifted when he found Adil outside his door, when his kisses dropped across Toby’s skin. 

But this...this is a volley of machine-gun fire in his chest, a canister of mustard gas let loose in his lungs, a noose of barbed wire around his throat. It is a thousand times worse. And then some.

Desperation rising in his chest, he looks back, towards the cracked monolith of The Halcyon, darkened and squatting against the sky. Adil could be anywhere, he could have left through any door, he could be standing safely the next street over or even already on his way home. But Toby knows, as he would know the loss of a limb, with nausea and haemorrhaging terror, that Adil is still inside the hotel, unable to get out.

With his frail pulse thundering in his ears, Toby sinks through the sluggish stream of tattered aristocrats limping through the street in morbid bursts. He has to find Adil, he has to. He can’t leave him there, in the dark, in the cold. He can’t. He won’t. 

Somewhere behind him, Freddie calls his name, sharp and demanding, but Toby keeps moving forward.

The cavernous lobby is rubble, a blue marble sepulchre, splotches of clouded moonlight splattering ghoulishly on the tiles. The chilled stillness crawls down the back of Toby’s neck. But, shivering, he presses on, eyes turned up and away from the dark shapes that litter the floor. Hoarse shouts run down the grand stairs from the floors above, a chorus of men’s voices waiting for harrowed echoes, cut together with the sound of the building’s creaking cries of agony as it struggles to hold its own weight; Toby goes unnoticed amidst the ruin.

The broad mirrors and dainty glasses sit in clawed-up pieces on the cluttered remains of the lounge’s ceiling, shimmering like seeds of the moon, and the flimsy gold remnants of the anniversary celebration flutter limply in the leaking breeze. Toby staggers to the bar. Blank nausea swirls in his throat, warm and belligerent, and he peers over the counter, numbly terrified of what he might find. 

Nothing but haphazard debris and broken bottles.

“Adil?” He calls quietly, his voice clamped up by the dread-bound air of reverence that has settled in over the destruction. 

No answer comes. 

“Adil!” 

Where had he been? Just before the bomb hit. Where had he been? Hadn’t Toby been looking? Hadn’t he ought to remember?

He trips up and over the lake of splintered stools and shelves, and the dainty, silver-bell toll of crushed glass and the powdery crunch of pargeting trails along behind his feet; he shoulders open the bar door. The floor is sloppy with a rancid mixture of wine and liquor, congealed around charred islands of plaster and wood. Smoke and heat come barreling down the hallway like lashes from a whip, tiding with the creeping, indecisive orange shadows that slap along the tile walls.

“Adil!” 

The smoke slithers into his lungs, scraping rough-edged coughs from his throat, and he almost misses the weak reply.

“Toby?”

It is what he imagines a miracle must feel like, the moment when he sees Adil slumped against the wall, bloodied, bruised, blackened but _alive_. Toby drops to his knees beside him, heedless of the mess, like a born-again devotee brought to worship. 

“Oh God.” Thick tears pool in his eyes, pulled out by the astringent smoke and pure relief. His soft hands shake against Adil’s chest, trembling with the beat of his heart. “I thought I lost you.”

Adil hands him a split-lip smile, and if it isn’t the most beautiful thing Toby has ever seen. “You won’t get rid of me that easily.” He shakes his head, and a small red tear shatters on the front of his uniform. “I tried--I tried...but I couldn’t--”

Murky coughs swallow his words as a darkening ribbon of blood trickles down from the obscured gash at his temple, clinging to his muted skin and folded along the curves of his face. His eyes reach out for Toby but fall short, unfocused and heavy as his breath clatters somewhere deep in his chest. A sharp-beaked, fluttery bird of panic hatches in Toby’s egg-shell stomach.

“Adil.” He slides his hands up to frame Adil’s face, his thumbs slipping across his cheekbones in sticky arcs. “Adil, stay with me. I’m going to get you out, alright?” 

Adil nods, barely there, and the heat of the fire licks curtly across Toby’s back; he doesn’t have much time. 

He shifts, hooking a clumsy arm under Adil’s crooked legs, the other around his back, and he tugs Adil close against his chest. On the slick tile and his hollow legs, he struggles to gain a solid footing, and his head has gone as fuzzy as the humid smoke that hugs in around them. But the fading coughs that quake through Adil’s body and Adil’s trusting arms looped around his neck spur him forward.

“I love you,” he prays, pressing fervent devotion into every syllable. “You’re going to be alright. Just hold on a bit longer. I love you. You’ll be alright. I’ve got you. I love you.” 

The reedy groans of stagnant sirens, living up to their mythological name, ricochet around the lobby as Toby hobbles out of the shambles. Beyond the fire’s immediate grasp, the grimy sweat on his skin ices over, and Adil is still and slack in his arms. Just as Toby’s scuffed knees signal their imminent surrender, Joe is upon him, his pristine hair brought to tangle and his shirtsleeves rolled up like a real working-class stiff. The questions that are clear in his eyes wither on his tongue when he recognises that it's Adil slumped in Toby's arms, and he reaches out to help. Instinctively, Toby wants to knock his hands away, protect Adil from the biting world beyond their two bodies, but he doesn’t have the strength to put up a fight.

With Joe’s help and effortless authority, Adil is quickly and safely tucked into one of the many weary ambulances stood at attention around the block. Toby lets his fingers linger, just a moment, as he steps away, surrendering his heart into undertrained, overworked hands. The doors shut with a muted crash, and the ambulance weaves and bobs as it knits its way down the torn street.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Joe asks, rounding on him. “Going in there alone? Are you outta your mind, kid?”

Toby doesn’t answer. 

In the distance, the ambulance’s lights waver like tiny boxed flames. 

“You have any idea how dangerous that was? You could have gotten trapped. You could have gotten hurt. You could have died.” 

Joe’s hand lands like a bomb on Toby’s shoulder and pulls, none too kindly. 

“Hey, you listening to me? Toby?”

“I...I--” 

The ambulance turns a corner, and Toby’s voice abandons him, the rush of its departure forcing him to the ground. As the full scope of the calamity collects on his hunched shoulders, he trembles on the kerb, his hands spread before him, coloured in patches of pink and black and the worst kind of red. For a long moment, Joe is silent, watching him and blending in with the noisy hush as the world continues around them. Then he leaves without a word: knowing far more than he should, off to be a hero. 

Toby can’t move.

\---

The rigid fumes of antiseptic that strangle the air are enough to make Toby’s nose burn and his stomach turn. As he obediently trudges in the wake of the perky but chipped nurse, his eyes, in want of rest, push back against the bright, unfiltered light that marches through the broad-shouldered window stationed at the end of the corridor. His inelegant footsteps trample around in the empty space, and the sound of a woman’s politely restrained sobbing scrapes along the bare walls.

Toby hates it here.

He tugs his collar away from his tacky throat; it doesn’t help.

His skin stings, raw and crawling with the phantoms of the night before. No matter how hard he had scrubbed in his borrowed bath, he couldn’t push out the woozy scent of the world burning. It sits on him, within him, wiggling out beneath his fresh suit.

“Just in here, dear,” the nurse says with thin-stretched comfort and a cursory grin. She sweeps her arm out toward the arched opening: an invitation and a silent request to be dismissed.

Toby nods and manages a dull smile in return. “Thank you.”

The room yawns out—tall and wide and closely dotted with too many starchy cots, all in duty—and the large, frequent windows lend the space a plastic sense of light and optimism. Doctors and nurses in stiff white uniforms bustle through the maze of beds like confused ants, speaking rapid-fire in jumbled but important words and scratching away on their clipboards. There are at least thirty men, in various states of disrepair and agony, stretched out along the walls, but Toby’s eyes cut straight through them—to the bed in the corner, to the only man that matters.

With shoddy composure, Toby strides across the room. More than anything, he wants to throw himself down and tuck himself in alongside Adil, to kiss him and to bury himself in Adil’s arms until the fear lifts from his chest and he can forget that their bodies were ever apart. But, as always, he holds himself back.

Adil’s slight frame is swamped and pale in the spotty bedclothes the hospital has given him. A deep red blotch mars the bandage webbed across his head, but he seems otherwise untouched; beneath the bandage, his hair has broken away from its meticulous pomade wave and has fallen, loose and soft and jumbled over his face. The sight is a flat kick in the chest, a living memory of all the gold-dusted nights they have spent learning love by its own hand and carefully writing its words across each other’s bodies.

There is a lean bouquet on the table propped beside Adil’s bed, full of wilted red and drooping yellow; Emma must have been through, one of many stops to one of many staff members in one of many hospitals that she will visit today, bound by duty and compassion to dole out the tender-hearted touch her stilted father lacks. A flash of guilt grabs Toby by the stomach and leers at his empty, late hands. 

Adil’s eyes open, slowly, as Toby draws nearer; even narrowed against the sharp sunlight, they spark with quiet surprise, and a private smile rises to his lips. 

“Toby,” he says, more a rasp than a word, but warm and rounded all the same. “What are you doing here?”

Toby frowns. “I had to see you. I had to know--” His voice trails, sawn off by an aborted breath. He sends his eyes skittering across the room, watching the people busy spinning on in their own worlds. No one has any time to pay attention to him, so he takes the risk. His fingers slip through Adil’s like pieces of a puzzle coming home to rest. “I had to know that you were alright. All night, I--I couldn’t--I kept thinking about you, in here, alone, and I--”

Adil squeezes his hand; Toby falls silent. 

“Toby,” he says, like a gentle benediction. His eyes melt with love and sincerity. “I’m fine. Only a broken rib and a mild concussion.”

Relief pushes through Toby’s chest, untangling a small portion of the gnarled web of emotion that has built up there in the fickle chaos of the past twenty-four hours. His world has been ruthlessly, irrecoverably knocked off course, but it pales in comparison to the tender joy of having Adil here, hale and whole.

“Thank God. I don’t know what I would’ve done if--”

“You don’t have to know. You got me out, and I’m alright, I promise.” He slips his hand from Toby’s as a vivid nurse stomps by on her prescribed kitten heels, but he repays its loss handsomely with a sunny grin. “I’ll be back home tomorrow at the latest.”

Home. The word is a shudder down Toby’s spine, a hollow shell spilt out on the pavement. Of course, he has never had a home that lived up to the sentimental notions trapped in those four hallowed letters. But on the rare, small nights when the world felt gracious enough to look the other way for a few hours, tangled in each other and the sheets, he and Adil had come so very close to making something of that fabled word. But now the safety of his room is being swept up off the street in charred chunks, and the only space they had ever taken for themselves has been wiped away, just like that.

But Toby doesn’t want to let it go. Not without a fight.

And so, the idea wades to the front of his mind through a lake of broken glass thoughts. It comes on a wave of rose and romance, and Toby knows it is hasty and unrealistic, but it lays its petal hands over his assorted wounds, and he shivers with its idyllic warmth.

“Come home with me,” he whispers before he can think better of it.

Adil’s brow furrows with amused confusion. “What?”

“It will be months, a year maybe before the hotel is fully restored. I’ll have to take out a flat in the meantime.” He lowers his head and studies his fingers as they twist in the grating sheets. “I could find one with two bedrooms, we could make as if you were to be my valet. The bar’s been destroyed, and you’ll be in need of work,” he says, as if it truly is and could be that simple. “Nobody will question it.”

The following silence fizzles over Toby’s skin, drizzling a sickly heat down the back of his neck as he chews his lip and waits for a response of any kind from Adil. 

“You know...” Toby can hear the sly grin in Adil’s voice, and his head snaps up. “All those years watching from behind the bar, I never pegged you for such a romantic, Toby Hamilton.” He bumps his hand against Toby’s, an expertly staged accident, and a red-cheeked smile elbows its way onto Toby’s lips. “But you keep surprising me.”

“Is that a yes?”

Adil rolls his eyes, but his grin doesn’t move. “It would be risky, Toby.”

“I know, but we’ll be careful. Like we always are.” 

The longer he cradles the idea in his neglected palms, the more he finds he wants it. Truly wants it, more than anything. It’s a lofty and rather heady thought, swirling around Toby’s mind in a pleasant haze: a home where they could be together whenever they chose, without need for contrived coincidences and painful discretion; where the sleek dogs of fear would be soundly shut outside the door, unable to tear at their stomachs or gnaw on their minds; where they would not have to begin each morning subjecting themselves to the tinny torture of the wireless and its long list of destruction just to be sure of each other’s safety; where they could be like any other young, eager couple in love, kiss and hold each other, and share a bed through the night instead of sneaking a few paltry hours and being left in the chilly wake. Their home would be bound in contrasts, a helter-skelter creation of two separated lives falling together in unordained harmony; it would be theirs and theirs alone, and it would be beautiful.

“You haven’t yet said no,” he adds, quietly.

Adil chuckles. “That’s because I’m very much enjoying the idea.” 

The dignified, funereal toll of Big Ben washes through the windows, lapping against the fragile glass in twelve distant strokes, like an alarm clock drawing Toby away from a pleasant dream; he frowns, blinking against the invasive light of the fractured city, and his body sinks as he finds himself recoated in reality; his newborn fantasy crumbles easily under the sticky weight. 

Adil rolls his eyes once more. “Go. I’m sure your family needs you now. I’ll be alright here.”

Swallowing his burry disappointment, Toby lays an innocent, companionable hand on Adil’s shoulder. “Think about it?” 

Adil nods, but spontaneous and potentially perilous as it may be, the idea has taken root, and they both know the decision is already made. 

Toby—rather desperate and still saturated in downy relief—practically aches with the need to kiss Adil, so he makes do with a smile. As usual.

“I’ll come by yours tomorrow night,” he promises, though he means _I love you_.

\---

It’s nearly two weeks before Toby finds a suitable place. Concerned as he was with his own stone-turning search for temporary employment, Adil had entrusted full control of the housing hunt to Toby, and it was a duty he did not take lightly. In his ever-dwindling time away from work, Toby has passed through what seems to be every two-room flat in central London that hasn’t been reduced to a pile of debris; it’s a long, dusty procession of mediocrity, and the outlook isn’t quite sunny. He tries, at one point, roping Emma in for her keen eyes, financial awareness, and, not least, her pleasant company, but she is increasingly swallowed by the goliath details of piecing The Halcyon back together, and he is obligated to continue on his own. 

He is on the verge of capitulating, taking root in the first ratty place he can secure when he finds it. The narrow red-brick building is unassuming, situated in a rare pocket of the city that hasn’t yet been kicked into rubble and despair. It’s secreted away from the haughty, stifling air of Mayfair, not too far from Toby’s office, and a sturdy bomb shelter is burrowed in the ground a hundred metres down the way. The street is a quiet one, with minimal foot traffic, and the flat itself sits above a small grocery shop and aside a quaint bakery. It seems almost too good to be true, and as Toby approaches, he's careful to keep his expectations tempered, lest he get his hopes up only to be sorely disappointed once again.

The sniff-kneed landlord greets Toby with a cracked smile at the door and ushers him in with gusto. He’s quite anxious to rent the flat out to a reputable tenant, he tells Toby as he leads him up a narrow set of stairs, and he senses decency in Toby, likes the cut of his jib; he likes it even more when he places Toby’s name in his memory and hears the echoes of wealth behind it; though, Toby can only hope he’ll still like him when he finds out Toby’s connection to the Hamilton fortune stops at his name and that his skinny bank account is fed on a measly civil servant’s salary.

The flat spans the entirety of the second floor, and Toby fiddles with the mask box strung over his shoulder—a newly necessary accessory to ward off the haunting touch of war—as the landlord sorts through his eclectic collection of keys and unlocks the thick black door with a definitive click. He swings the door open and beckons Toby forward.

The floors are scratched and whine at the slightest pressure, but the wood is a rich, dark colour that warms the limited space and eagerly soaks in the slanted light from the front bay window. A dim, enclosed kitchen is nestled immediately to the right of the entry—boasting fading linoleum and slightly-out-of-date appliances squashed together in a neat, Formica-topped row—and two cramped bedrooms squat along the stubby hallway that branches from the main living space. 

The room on the left is drab and gloomy; with one skinny window pressed up against an unremarkable alleyway and a rickety single bed frame, it is something more like a spacious closet than a true bedroom. But its heavy shadows and patchy carpet will fair well enough for a secluded study or a studio for Adil to sketch away in. 

The other room, though completely empty, is a marked improvement. It’s plastered in a cream-coloured wallpaper with an admirably simple scalloped design, and it has two stretching windows stood side by side, peering down on the calm street below. On the far wall, there is a thin wardrobe and a private entrance to the eye-searingly white bathroom. 

By all accounts, it is an average bedroom, but Toby’s chest tightens when he thinks about sharing it with Adil, investing themselves into every nook and cranny: a cosy bed with the duvet pulled back on both sides, matching bedside tables cluttered with the personal fragments of their daily lives, Adil’s clothes hanging in the wardrobe and folded in the bureau alongside Toby’s.

The flat is not much, not by the opulent standards he was raised on, but as Toby stands in the living room, hardly registering the landlord’s exaggerated sales pitch, the space wraps itself around his threadbare shoulders, and he knows it’s right. 

A week later, at half-past five, Adil and Toby lug the last of their things up into the flat. Toby—shouldering the majority of the load to ease the stress on Adil’s still healing injuries—is fast becoming overly aware of the bodily impact his academic, predominately sedentary life has left on him, and he quickly waddles over to the stumpy coffee table and dumps his box on it before his arms give out under the weight. Stretching his stair-broken back, he sweeps his eyes across the room. 

They weren’t able to salvage anything from his suite—unsurprising given the bomb that had splattered straight through it—but he had been able to ship in a good bit of furniture from his hastily evacuated flat in Oxford that hitherto had been functioning solely to gather dust. It’s furniture his mother had hand-picked when he first fled to university: cold, dainty things with curls and flourishes, intricate detail and inhospitable luxury smuggled into every inch. Not a single piece is even mildly suited to Toby’s plain, straight-edged taste. But settled in opposition to Adil’s dark, caringly worn possessions, Toby finds a new appreciation for each of them: the ornate end table does not seem so frivolous when it holds up a time-yellowed portrait of Adil’s family; the tufted leather sofa is not so formidable and unfriendly when Adil’s lovingly handmade throw is draped neatly along the back; the polished dining table hardly rebuffs company when Adil’s rich red and gold-lined tablecloth is poured over its gleaming surface.

The door falls shut with a solid thunk, and Toby turns back to Adil. Standing in the middle of this hallow mixture of themselves, broken free of his stiff uniform, Adil has never been more beautiful. 

It’s frankly unbelievable, how far they’ve managed to come despite the world being entirely set against them. Just a few months ago, Toby could have never imagined that he would ever be able to understand and embrace the flighty flutter Adil kicks off in his chest, let alone that they would ever have a home together. Originally, Toby had thought Adil was a mere error in the equation, an isolated flaw that could be targeted and removed with surgical precision, but he realises now that Adil was the key, the sequence that unlocked Toby’s truth, the missing piece that cracked the enigma. 

A smile bursts on Toby’s lips. He can’t help himself. He holds out his hand.

“Dance with me?”

“We don’t have any music,” Adil protests lightly, but he sets down his box and makes his way over, threading his fingers through Toby’s.

Toby shakes his head and reels Adil in close. “We don’t need it.” He lays an easy kiss at the corner of Adil’s lips and slips his arm around Adil’s waist.

Their dancing is more of a controlled sway than anything else, but they can’t be bothered to mind. Cheek to cheek, they hold each other in open secrecy, delighted in the small intimacy and secluded normalcy. The barriers drop away, and they are only themselves. Despite it all, they have found their way into each other. Beyond it all, they are in love.

“Someday,” Toby whispers into Adil’s hair. A prophecy, a prayer. “Someday, I’m going to marry you, Adil Joshi.”

“You think so?” Adil teases. He pulls back just enough to look Toby in the eye.

“No,” Toby says with deadset certainty. More certainty than he’s ever scrounged together before in his entire rocky life. “I promise.”

Adil’s laugh swirls upwards, expands to fill the room with its rosy warmth, and he pulls Toby closer. The war and the world continue to bark outside their door, but Toby and Adil pay them no mind. They move to the beat of their hearts in the silence, huddled together in their separate peace.


End file.
